“The Blue Nuns”, from artist Susan Schellenberg, Shedding Skins.

In my last post, I mentioned Susan Schellenberg as having experienced mental illness, but I prefer to talk of “emotional pain.”  I use “emotional pain” to refer to psychological difficulties that

• Cause substantial distress.
• Interfere with ability to achieve important life goals.
• Interfere with ability to enjoy caring and mutually respectful relationships.

Emotional pain is pervasive.  Who among us has been untouched by it?  Emotional pain makes prominent public appearances usually under the name “mental illness” and “mental health care.”  Millions live with serious mental illness; mental health problems are among the leading causes of disability in terms of productive years lost (see for example, the Out of the Shadows at Last, Transforming Mental Health, Mental Illness and Addiction Services in Canada.

So why not just talk about mental illness? Because names matter and experiences named as mental illness can actually be named in many ways – as stress, heartache, wounds, demons, voice hearing, being strung out, being freaked out, a melt-down, a breakdown, a dark night of the soul, the shadow, grief, obsession, terror, shot nerves, apathy, jitters, despair, and so on. Each of these names implies a particular understanding and response to the experience. Because names matter, I want to keep in mind that “mental illness,” specific diagnoses, and “mental health care” are ways of naming and responding to emotional pain, but are not the only ways of naming and responding to emotional pain. For example, hospital physicians diagnosed Susan with Acute Schizophrenic Reaction, but Susan eventually named her own emotional pain in other ways, e.g, as a raging blue nun and a Nazi-like faceless priest (as explained in the Shedding Skins exhibit and Committed to the Sane Asylum). Physicians recommended medication for Acute Schizophrenic Reaction, while Susan took different steps in response to rage and self-criticism.

I talk about emotional pain so that I can stay open to the many possibilities for naming and responding to such pain. Part of what excites me about arts productions are the myriad of ways in which those creating the work choose to name and respond to emotional pain. So from here on, I’ll be mostly speaking of emotional pain, and referring to mental illness only in situations where a diagnosis of mental illness has some bearing on the artistic production.

Production:  Shedding Skins, Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH), Clarke site, 250 College Street (College and Spadina), Toronto.  The exhibit is in the hallway outside of the auditorium at the back (north end) of the main floor.  Shedding Skins and other work done by Susan can be seen at her website.

Now on or upcoming:  Transformation by Fire, February 7-April 8, 2013, 111 Queen’s Park, Gardiner Museum, Toronto.

The Pinto and the Nun by artist Susan Schellenberg, Shedding Skins.

The Shedding Skins paintings show dream images, a nun riding a pinto through the desert, a ghostly Beethoven contemplating a small vibrant green tree, a fragile, though armoured Joan of Arc astride her powerful horse,. The text tells a story of mental illness and healing.

This exhibit by artist Susan Schellenberg, is on permanent display at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH). Susan trained and worked as a public health nurse until she became a wife, homemaker, and mother. In 1969, after the birth of her fourth child and while caring for her ill mother, she experienced a psychotic break and was hospitalized at the former Lakeshore Psychiatric Hospital in Toronto. Ten years later, at a point of despair, she sought medical help to discontinue anti-psychotic medication, resolved to heal, and decided to keep a painted record of her dreams as she healed.  Remember that I have been writing and giving presentations with Susan for some years, so am not a disinterested observer of her work.

Susan defines herself as an artist, so her decision to exhibit in a hospital is interesting. She was moved by the writings of art critic Suzi Galick to practice socially engaged art where art is created and displayed not as a gallery experience or for commercial purposes, but as a means to contribute to greater interconnectedness and community wholeness. With this in mind, Susan arranged to place her paintings and story of mental illness and healing at the heart of a major psychiatric teaching hospital where they are seen daily by individuals who are deeply affected and involved with mental illness as patients, family or professional staff.

Mental illness, treatment, and recovery are often highly distressing and shielded from public view. Susan’s work is a public window on vital, but ordinarily private experiences, and an opportunity to talk about medical model mental health care versus a healing or recovery-oriented approach. When Susan first experienced intense distress, she received medical model care. She saw an expert doctor who asked about symptoms, observed, then diagnosed one of the mental illnesses listed in the American Psychiatric Association’s diagnostic manual, currently, the DSM-IV. Susan was encouraged to return to normal by following the doctor’s orders, for example, take your meds. The medical model approach highlights symptoms, diagnosis and treatment. The emphasis is on disease and cure, or at least symptom relief. The process of receiving care and achieving a cure is considered private.

When feeling worse after some years of medical model care, Susan wanted to feel better, and so began a process of recovery and healing. She explains that recovery and healing occur step-by-step. The emphasis is on having a good life. Along the way, individuals often renew hope and commitment, redefine self, take control, engage in meaningful activities, exercise citizenship, and engage in supportive relationships with others. Professionals may be involved, but many other activities and supports are important to recovery and healing. Professionals who work in a recovery and healing model will highlight the individual’s life aspirations, abilities, accomplishments, and possibilities. Some healing work is done in private, but healing always takes place in relationship with others, so is always, to some degree, also a public process. For Susan, painting was important. As she explains in Committed to the Sane Asylum, the public process of exhibiting later became important in her healing.

Susan tells how she was helped by medical model care in an immediate crisis, but used a recovery and healing approach to establish a good life. Her work documents the recovery and healing response to mental illness.

Production:  Shedding Skins, Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH), Clarke site, 250 College Street (College and Spadina), Toronto.  The exhibit is in the hallway outside of the auditorium at the back (north end) of the main floor.  Shedding Skins and other work done by Susan can be seen at her website.

Now on or upcoming:  Transformation by Fire, February 7-April 8, 2013, 111 Queen’s Park, Gardiner Museum, Toronto.

My next stop at the conference was A Well-Being & Healing Approach to Mental Illness:  Susan Schellenberg, Rosemary Barnes PhD.  They have written a book called Committed to the Sane Asylum.   Susan and Rosemary are both gray-haired women, and it occurs to me that this conference is heavy with old folks.  It takes a lot of years of experience and maturity to figure out how you really should be treating people, and to reject the Drugs R Us approach to treating mental illness.

Except that one of the woman—the Ph.D. one—tells us that they don’t call it mental illness or use diagnostic labels; they just call it “emotional pain.”  That works for me.  Who among us has not felt emotional pain and cannot identify with the concept?  And if you haven’t felt emotional pain then get out of my way—you are not human.

The Ph.D. person goes on to talk about working as a psychologist in an institution and getting really disillusioned and restive and, finally, leaving the institution and going into “exile.”  In other words, she is also a doctor in recovery.  Then she introduces the other woman, who is an artist, and starts showing slides of the artist’s work.

The artist tells her story of being diagnosed with schizophrenia, put on drugs, and locked up in the asylum.  She did this for ten years then got out of the institution, stopped taking drugs, and developed her life as an artist.  As she speaks, we are looking at her art work.  What you would expect to see at a psychiatric conference is the standard “descent into madness” crap:  wild colors, disorganized figures, no boundaries, no subtle definitions.

But what I am looking at is taking my breath away.  There is a charcoal drawing of Joan of Arc on her horse and I am transfixed by the power of the horse, and thinking “How did she do that?”  Another painting is as if from the back of a long, dark cathedral.  A bowed person sits in a small light in the front, and overhead there is a bright globe—stained glass window or sun or son?

I read somewhere that a good painting is one that is alive every time you walk into the room; it never fades into the background and just hangs there.  Given that definition, this is a great painting.  I kinda-sorta wish the women would stop talking so I can figure out what keeps bringing my attention to the painting, but the artist is relating her studies, career development, and passage to healing.

I have been to many psych conferences where a professional presents a patient.  They have been, without exception, condescending, patronizing and extremely embarrassing.  (See the sick-o?  See how well she’s learned to perform?  See how much progress she’s made?)  What I am witnessing here is two women with unique talents describing a collaborative journey out of institutional madness—one as a care provider, the other as a care recipient.

They are both healing nicely, thank you. 

The care provider puts up a slide that lists some of the necessary qualities of healing and it includes “refuge”—a walk in the park, gardening—and creativity.  I realize that my recent post, “Happiness is . . .” (http://behindthelockeddoors.wordpress.com/2011/04/03/happiness-is-2/ ) could just as correctly have been called “Healing is . . .” but I have missed two things.

First is establishing your foundation in the natural world.  We are animals; we are not vegetables or minerals.  One thing that is essential to healing and/or happiness is returning to our fundamental relationship with nature.  In the same way that a child is reassured and reoriented by cuddling against a parent’s chest and hearing the parent’s heartbeat, so we are reassured and reoriented by hearing the life-throb of Mother Nature.  Go hiking; sit under the stars at night; take up bird watching or learn cloud formations.  For me, I gardened; I called it “worm therapy” as I got down on my knees and worked the soil.  Going to the mall is only going to make you crazier; going home to the land is healing.

Second is creativity.  How could I have missed it?  Creativity was so fundamental to my wellness that I didn’t even notice.  I have been a writer for half a century.  In the first year after I stopped taking drugs, my mantra was “a thousand words before breakfast.”  I would wake in the darkness, pull up my laptop and begin to write.  It is in our creativity that we unite our mind and spirit.  We gather all our perceptions and experiences of the world and integrate them within our selves.  Values and philosophy, hope and passion, relationships and independence—all are called into play when one creates.  Whether it is painting or writing, singing or dancing, or any other thing, creativity is the integrating function that says “I am—and I alone am this, or this, or this.”  Creativity is the force that establishes a singular identity.

I leave the workshop room and go to the bookstore and buy their book, “Committed to the Sane Asylum,” then I wheel into Psychotherapy and Medication for Military Stress:  Maj. Maria Kimble, MSW, LCSW.”  (To be continued)